Teaching design to management students. Challenges and risks toward a new integrative pedagogy.

The impact that design is having on managerial culture and practice is progressively influencing the pedagogy and the learning path related to engineering courses. After the era of the “Project-Based Learning” paradigm (PBL) the attention of teachers and scholars is nowadays shifting on Strategic Design and Design Thinking pedagogy. How the basic principles of Design Thinking can be transferred in those educational contexts where an increasing interdependence between design and management is occurring? What are the main learning takes away that management engineering students are more able to absorb and what the difficulties to face in a strategic design studio? What “design tools” mainly enhance creative leaps in a project? To address that questions an exploratory inquiry on 54 students involved in a Strategic Design course placed in a Management Engineering Master Degree has been run. Results derived through the use of descriptive statistics show that management engineering students from a Strategic Design studio mainly grasp – as major takes away - the framing/reframing logics, the visual thinking abilities and the knowledge to explore user experience and context. Moreover framing/reframing the design problem represents even the most difficult capability to learn jointly with the visual representation of business idea and the impulse to propose new solutions. Finally – according to the results - students consider developmental tools as customer journey, service blueprint and offering map – placed in the middle-final part of the creative process - more oriented to create creative leaps and to search for alternative solutions.